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Updated: Aug 16, 2026

Using Visual and Narrative Methods to Achieve Fair Process in Clinical Care
Published on: February 16, 2011
The narrative nature of clinical reasoning
1Department of Occupational Therapy, University of Illinois at Chicago 60612.
Abstract:
Narrative reasoning is a central mode of clinical reasoning in occupational therapy. Therapists reason narratively when they are concerned with disability as an illness experience, that is, with how a physiological condition is affecting a person's life. In this paper, narrative reasoning is contrasted with propositional reasoning, and two kinds of narrative thinking are examined. The first is the use of narrative as a mode of speech that can be contrasted with biomedical discourse, in which disability is framed as physical pathology. The second involves the creation rather than the telling of stories. Therapists try to "emplot" therapeutic encounters with patients, that is, to help create a therapeutic story that becomes a meaningful short story in the larger life story of the patient.
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